Israel’s wars reignite Judaism’s oldest argument.
A struggle for thousands of years between sanctity and survival still shapes how Jews fight, doubt, and define our power.
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This is a guest essay by Nachum Kaplan, who writes the newsletter, “Moral Clarity.”
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and Spotify.
Disagreement among Jews about when the war against Hamas in Gaza should have ended has been a fascinating study in Jewish ethics and conscience. Some felt it should have ended a year ago, especially given the international pressure Israel was under, while others (like me) thought it should continue until Hamas has been destroyed.
No power is more morally self-conscious than Jewish power, and no conscience is more historically burdened than the Jewish one. For 3,000 years, Jewish history has been a tension between the sword and the scroll; between the need and will to fight and survive and the obligation to remain good while doing so.
From King David’s battlefield to the Israel Defense Forces’ code of ethics, the Jewish dilemma has been how do a people chosen for holiness survive in a world built on violence? How does the nation that invented moral law wield power without betraying it?
The story of Jewish sovereignty, ancient and modern, is this long civilizational struggle between sanctity and survival.
The first Jewish king was also the first Jewish warrior. David united the Hebrew tribes, expanded territory and defended his fragile kingdom against annihilation. He led the Jews to victory, but his hands were bloodstained — so much so that when he sought to build the Temple, God forbade it: “You have shed much blood upon the earth in My sight.”
In that refusal lies the paradox that defines Jewish history. Power is necessary for survival, yet somehow morally disqualifying. The Jew could not live without the sword yet was never meant to be ruled by it.
Judaism was the first civilization to moralize power, to insist that force without righteousness is idolatry. Israel’s kings were not gods, but servants bound by law. In the ancient world, this idea was as revolutionary as it was intolerable. While other empires glorified conquest, the Jews glorified conscience. Their prophets rebuked their kings. Their victories were written more in lament than in triumph.
The Jewish political imagination was always ambivalent about power, simultaneously commanded to defend life and warned against worshipping the means of doing so.
When the Second Temple fell in 70 CE at Rome’s hand and the Jews were scattered, the sword was taken from their hands. For two millennia, Jewish life survived in submission. The rabbis turned powerlessness into virtue. The absence of sovereignty became proof of moral superiority — and, paradoxically, of divine favor. Thinking really cannot get more annoyingly rabbinical than that.
The ghetto replaced the battlefield; prayer replaced politics. Jewish ethics turned inward with survival through faith and endurance through restraint. Powerlessness became sanctified because it was imposed and unavoidable. Living without armies or borders was interpreted as a moral calling, not a curse. It preserved dignity in the face of humiliation, but it also created a reflexive suspicion of power, even one’s own.
This reflex survived exile and migrated into Jewish psychology. It became the collective nervous system of a people allergic to domination, including from their own, which helps explain why the debate in Israel about judicial reform has become so heated.
When modern Zionism emerged, it was a heresy in the sense that it reversed two millennia of Jewish moral grammar. It declared that holiness was not in suffering but in rebuilding, and that piety without sovereignty was death disguised as humility.
The early Zionists were moral insurgents as much as political ones. They demanded that Jews take responsibility for their fate again and become historical actors, not eternal victims. Yet with that reclamation came the ancient anxiety of how to hold a weapon without becoming Pharaoh.
The State of Israel’s founders knew the dangers. Its first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, said: “We do not want to become a Sparta.” It is this reference that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was building on in a recent speech when suggesting Israel become a regional “super-Sparta.” It also explains the depth of the political feeling and backlash against Netanyahu.
The Jewish state’s founders created an army that would fight existential wars while remaining bound to ethical codes more stringent than any other army imposes on itself. The IDF was built to win wars decisively and to remain human while doing so. From its inception, the IDFs carried the Hebrew Bible’s moral DNA. The IDF’s code, “The Spirit of the IDF,” reads like a modern psalm: “The soldier shall maintain his humanity, even in combat.” It is an extraordinary demand. No army fighting for its survival should have to apologize for existing, yet Israel’s army does so daily.
The IDF operates under a doctrine known as Tohar HaNeshek (“the purity of arms”). It insists that force be used proportionately, defensively, and morally restrained. Soldiers are taught that power’s moral burden is as real as its necessity. In practice, this means self-limitation that borders on madness: phone calls and text messages to people inside a building before airstrikes on it, leaflets to warn civilians, restraint under fire. It means Israeli soldiers risking their lives to spare enemy noncombatants.
It is not by accident that in Gaza the IDF has achieved what is generally believed to be the lowest civilian-to-combatant ratio in urban warfare’s long history. It is why foreign military observers have been lining up to learn how the IDF achieved this. It is also why allegations that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza are patent nonsense.
To the cynic or arch realist, this is weakness. To Jewish conscience, it is identity. The Jewish soldier fights for Israel’s soul as well as its borders. Yet the world does not see it that way.
Much of the West remains inherently suspicious of Jewish power, seeing it as an inversion of history’s moral order. Armed, assertive, unapologetic Jews disturb the Western mind and conscience. Thus, every time Israel defends itself, it is accused of excess. Every time it exercises restraint, it is disbelieved. The same world that condemned Jewish passivity in Europe now condemns Jewish agency in Gaza.
But Israel’s critics are not really judging its tactics; Jewish power itself is the offense. What the West cannot comprehend is that Jewish power is not a departure from Jewish morality, but its continuation by other means. The Torah does not romanticize weakness; it demands justice and recognizes the necessity of defense — “You shall not stand idly by the blood of your neighbor.” That commandment is as binding in Tel Aviv as it was in Sinai.
Jewish ethics has always known the moral tension between survival and sanctity, which is why Jewish soldiers are taught to wrestle, not just to fight. In every war, Israel reenacts that ancient struggle between the prophet and the king, between the moral absolutist and the realist.
David fought to live; Nathan reminded him to live justly. Both were right. The tragedy of Jewish history is not that Jews lacked power, but that they feared what power might do to them. Israel’s founding of Israel broke that fear, but it did not soothe the anxiety. No other nation debates its morality in real time while under rocket fire, or carries philosophers in its chain of command, or mourns its enemies on national television. This is not moral weakness; it is moral singularity.
Yet the danger is real. In a world that demands purity from Jews and nothing from anyone else, conscience can become self-destruction. Israel’s moral survival depends on remembering that conscience is not guilt, but guidance.
King David’s story is the parable of Jewish power in every age. He was a warrior-poet who built a kingdom, sinned, repented, and wrote the Psalms. He embodied the eternal dialectic between the sword and the lyre — between justice and mercy, vengeance and grace. He was both hero and a warning that Jewish power is blessed only when it remembers who gave it, and cursed when it forgets.
The secular West has no answer. It no longer believes in holiness, only in legality (and it cannot define that meaningfully). It has turned international law into a weapon to wield against Israel. Legality without sanctity produces cynicism and Israel, like Judaism itself, was not built to be cynical, but life-affirming.
For Jews, power is not a license; it is part of the covenant. It is permission bound by purpose and sovereignty tethered to self-restraint. It is the paradox of a people commanded to be both a light unto nations and a shield unto itself.
Every generation of Jewish power rehashes the same argument between those who say morality weakens them and those who say it defines them. It is this argument that keeps Jewish power from decaying into brutality or dissolving into paralysis. Jewish conscience is not an obstacle to victory; it is the reason victory matters.
The IDF’s restraint, its constant self-scrutiny, its insistence on ethical codes even when its enemies exploit them — these are not PR strategies, as is clear from the headlines. They are theological statements. They declare that Jewish sovereignty is not just survival, but civilization continued in uncivilized times and circumstance.
Hello Mr. Kaplan
You write:
"Disagreement among Jews about when the war against Hamas in Gaza should have ended has been a fascinating study in Jewish ethics and conscience. Some felt it should have ended a year ago, especially given the international pressure Israel was under, while others (like me) thought it should continue until Hamas has been destroyed."
It is quite clear today that international pressure on Israel to stop the war a year ago actually came from within. The aim was political not ethical, to prove that Netanyahu was unable to defeat Hamas ISIS.
You then wrote:
"The first Jewish king was also the first Jewish warrior. David united the Hebrew tribes."
David was the second King of Israel. The first King was Saul from the tribe of Benjamin.
You wrote: "Power is necessary for survival, yet somehow morally disqualifying."
Really? In our neighborhood without power, you're a dead duck. That has been true since the days of Abraham, Moses and Joshua.
The consequences:
"For two millennia, Jewish life survived in submission."
Never again is never again!
"Jewish ethics turned inward with survival through faith and endurance through restraint."
The price: expulsion, slaughter, rape, pogroms, slavery, inquisition and the Holocaust.
"People in Israel allergic to domination, including from their own, which helps explain why the debate in Israel about judicial reform has become so heated."
There was no debate. The Left refused debate, even though they knew and know that Judicial-reform is essential.
They created total anarchy, refusal to serve, incitement, chaos and lawlessness which brought on our country the 7th of October 2023.
"The political feeling and backlash against Netanyahu."
If that's the case, how do you explain that Netanyahu is the longest elected PM of Israel?
The political backlash by the Left is their will to cling to power which they have lost in Democratic elections so they are clawing with their remaining powers to the judicial system and key figures in control. They are losing it. Their shame was exposed with the fall of several leading positions.
I won't get into the issue of the IDF not to expose here, online, its follies.
"No army fighting for its survival should have to apologize for existing, yet Israel’s army does so daily."
Big strategic mistake, especially with the global anti-Zionist atmosphere.
I won't go i to further debate but I would recommend all readers to read the following book:
The principle of survival by Dr. Uri Milstein
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uri_Milstein
Following Heraclitus ("War is the father of everything"), Milstein developed a philosophical theory according to which the "principle of survival" is a cornerstone in the operation of all beings that exist in the world.
In the book "General Security Theory - The Survival Principle" Milstein states that according to the human survival principle all human bodies strive to survive, and that it is a drive that is greater than all other drives, and is present in all other drives as a basic component. It is a desperate attempt to overcome the certain end or at least postpone it, which stems from the primal fear of death. Therefore, security is the ontological foundation of existence wherever it is. Every human body invests survival energy to perpetuate its existence, neutralizing the natural tendency towards entropy. The main task of human beings is the accumulation of survival energy, and every human body strives to accumulate as much of it as possible for the lean days. Survival energy includes means that humans use to survive, such as intelligence, territory, property, motivation, and physical efforts. So humans are mainly busy accumulating residual energy, which is also, among other things, the main motive behind all economic activity and capitalist capital accumulation. Sometimes an excessive attempt to accumulate survival energy may endanger the existence of the accumulated body or reduce its survivability, such as the strengthening of the Soviet army after World War II, or the strengthening of the IDF after the Six Day War, or the strengthening of the Iraqi army and its invasion of Kuwait.
Every human body is made up of many parts. Each part has its own existence, and each part has entropy processes. The interest of the survival of each part is stronger than the interest of the part in the existence of the whole body. The strongest and most serious threat to anybody is not the external threat but rather the internal one, the contradictions between the different parts of the whole, between themselves, and between them and the whole. Every body in the universe contradicts and threatens another body because it occupies a chunk of matter or energy that might be available to another body. The myth of security greatly empowers external enemies and ignores internal enemies that are more common and more dangerous to the survival of any system.
The intelligence, which is the unique ability of Homo sapiens to learn how to improve its survival abilities, developed in an evolutionary process due to its high survival value. The more a person invests in intelligence, the greater his chance of survival.
A necessary condition for the empowerment of intelligence is communication at a high level. And regular and egalitarian social life is a necessary condition for the existence of intelligent verbal communication, therefore a political entity that maintains a continuity of social life and acts by force against its enemies, is a necessary condition for the existence of intelligent beings. And democratic government is the optimal form of government from an intelligent point of view, because it has intelligent verbal communication between the decision-makers, the implementers and those affected by them, and there are no people immune to criticism. Milstein concludes that the fundamental anthropological model for understanding human behavior is the battle, in which each side strives to neutralize the other side to the point of destruction. This is the case in the financial field, in relation to spouses, in the jealousy of writers, and more.
The actions of the state are determined by the leaders who strive to survive happily and feel threatened when their political survival is threatened. Because they worry about their survival, sometimes a contradiction arises between the concern for themselves and the stratum they came from and the survival of all citizens. The state has a survival interest in fostering in its residents a sense of mutual dependence, and therefore, it fosters the institutions of family, religion, and national sentiment. The concept of political sovereignty includes the unlimited legitimate ability of the state to impose its will on all citizens, therefore the decision-makers direct the laws, culture, social values and ideologies to suit their desire to preserve their legitimate and unlimited ability to coerce. But for the most part, they do not exercise the power of coercion because they fear the loss of national approval. For the leaders, the survival of the country is a supreme value, which will justify the use of any means. Placing the survival of the state at the top of all interests is affected and will affect the human race more than any other factor.
In order to maintain their survival, the countries established security systems whose main components are police, army, and secret agencies. The security system is the main survival energy of political systems. The security systems have a dual character, they are designed to ensure the existence of the state, but they have an interest in ensuring their own existence, which can sometimes pose a threat to the survival of the state as in the case of the Soviet Army. All war is organized human violence designed to threaten or protect a political system. Every war, internal and external, is for or against a new order. Military systems because they are closed and undemocratic hierarchical systems, the level of intelligent communication in them is low, and it is difficult to reach the truth in them, therefore in these systems there is no process of intelligent learning of lessons, but rather a process of "Darwinian learning of lessons" of natural selection.
“The secular West has no answer. It no longer believes in holiness, only in legality (and it cannot define that meaningfully). It has turned international law into a weapon to wield against Israel. Legality without sanctity produces cynicism and Israel, like Judaism itself, was not built to be cynical, but life-affirming.
For Jews, power is not a license; it is part of the covenant. It is permission bound by purpose and sovereignty tethered to self-restraint. It is the paradox of a people commanded to be both a light unto nations and a shield unto itself.”